by Anneke Jacob
Looking through the bars I saw the other cages occupied by dogs, clearly pedigreed, beautifully groomed. There were also two ocelots and a capuchin monkey, a plumed vraag, and a pig-like sireuch. These were the only cages I could see from my position. The smells and the noise of animals invaded my consciousness in a wave, my own smell among them. The keeper was gone. I crouched in my small prison, unable to sit up fully or stretch out at all. I was so scared I had to breathe deeply and slowly to keep from losing it.
While I slowed my breathing I guessed at what was going on. The keeper was, as I had thought, an animal handler; evidently I was one of a cargo of exotic animals, probably being transported for sale. He didn’t wait to see if I would be docile, he just made sure I had no opportunity to misbehave; it probably saved him time. Or maybe my reputation had preceded me? I curled up in the straw, my back pushed up against the solid bars. Even if I had been able to speak intelligibly, no one here knew my language, and the Henthen language is, believe me, not on the curriculum in Raniz schools. I had known this, of course, but it really began to hit home.
For an appalling moment I felt sick for what I had lost. I closed my eyes, and for an instant I was back there. The animal noises were the scolding of my mothers, my aunts and sisters. I was silent by choice, not gagged and dumb.
I had been in control on Raniz; frustrating the elders, committing the misbehaviors, forcing the trial, choosing the punishment. Now I controlled nothing. Well, of course I had arranged that; that’s what I wanted, wasn’t it? No one to plead with me here, no one to offer me wise choices. Homesickness was followed by waves of dread. I lay there shivering and weeping, my wet mouth clenched on the bit. My other wet mouth responded instantly to the touch of my hand. I worked myself with small movements, coming so violently and fast that I whimpered through my tears.
As I opened my eyes the keeper was passing my cage with an indifferent glance. Instantly my face was flaming. No one had ever, ever seen me do that before. I curled myself up and covered my burning face, smelling my heady juices on my hand. In all my fantasies I had never imagined such humiliation.
Just being caught in such an act was not the worst of it, but in my initial confusion I couldn’t think why. I buried my head and closed my eyes tightly. But I kept seeing the keeper’s expression, or lack of it. His reaction was about what it would have been to a dog licking its cock. Animals masturbate in public; he was used to it. I moaned against my hands.
The doors to the airtruck were shut, and the craft took off. The animals in the cages just like mine barked, hissed, growled, settled into the straw.
A man came through the aisle between the cages, not the keeper but a younger man, who stopped and looked at me curiously. Cautiously he reached through the bars to stroke my hair and then my flank. I looked up at him for a moment, pleasured by his touch, and fascinated by his maleness, then thought of how the bit must look, and dropped my eyes. He gently grasped one breast and weighed it in his big hand, kneading it lightly.
Then he pulled one leg away from the other and stared between them. My thighs were slick with moisture, and I knew my cunt was swollen and red. I hardly breathed. Then with a little shrug he let me go, gave me a pat and walked up to the cockpit. I let out my breath and watched him all the way up the aisle.
It took an hour or so to reach our destination. I kept shifting positions, testing what was possible in my small kennel. I thought I had no dignity left, but I was wrong. I lost some more when we got there; I was walked on a leash in a courtyard and had to relieve myself, squatting, my hands fastened behind my back.
They pulled me through a big doorway. There was a tug at my head, and the bit was pulled from my mouth. One keeper held the leash in one hand, and my bound wrists up high behind my back with the other. The other swabbed my face with a cloth, brushed my hair and swept the straw from my skin. I was crimson when the impersonal hands touched me in intimate areas. I wanted to pull away, or to press myself against them. I did neither, but held myself still, trembling with the effort.
I was being held and handled by men, of course, and although I managed not to faint again, I still found their presence shattering. They were talking as they worked, about something unrelated to the chore at hand; try as I might I could make no sense of it. I shook my head in confusion.
They drew me into the middle of a cylindrical framework, which looked for a moment like a new kind of cage; one I could stand up in. But there were gaps big enough for me to slip through. Confused, I turned to look at the keepers. One was outside. The other firmly pulled my shoulders back, making me thrust out my chest, and angled my head upward with his fingers.
He pulled the leash through the framework at the top, so that the collar held me in place, almost in a choke hold. Then, keeping the tension on the leash, he slid himself out of the framework. Red lights all around me flashed once. Was this some kind of decontamination? They drew me out and away. When I looked back a few minutes later they had an ocelot in there, restless, its leash also stretched upward, and the lights flashed again. A tiny ocelot floated outside the frame. A holograph. I’d been holographed. Naked. Leashed. With my hands tied behind my back. I felt a helpless urge to hide.
They left my hands fastened when they fed me in the small cage. The food tasted unfamiliar but not inedible; I suspect it was monkey chow. I was so new at eating with my hands tied behind my back that I had to take frequent rests, looking covertly at the handlers to see if they were watching my humiliating performance. They barely glanced at me. When they took the bowl away they untied me at last, and I did my best to make myself comfortable, trying to wipe my food-covered face with bits of straw.
I slept fitfully, amazed each time I woke to be where I was. I touched and grasped the solid bars of the cage, and fingered the firm leather collar around my neck that I could not remove. I squirmed in discomfort on the prickly straw, and felt that I deserved it all.
Auction
The kennel courtyard boiled with activity the next day, with animals being exercised, washed and groomed. Dogs were being combed and clipped, the ocelots arching their backs like housecats as they were brushed. I was tied with my hands stretched out to each side, and was brushed down again and washed all over. I found myself panting, as if I’d been running. The bondage and all the touching were making me so agitated and excited that I couldn’t help pulling a bit on the ropes. A whimper kept rising in my throat. They rinsed me with a hose, pulled my head back to sluice down my hair, then combed and toweled me a little and left me to dry in the warm sunlight. I calmed down a little. There were several handlers now that I hadn’t seen the night before. But after their initial curiosity they barely looked at me. I began having catastrophic fantasies of no one wanting me at all.
The air was still, and the sky was an odd shade of deep, cloudless blue, changing to green as it approached the horizon. I could feel my hair rippling around my shoulders as it dried. I watched as a man walked around the rows of tethered animals, checking a computer and tagging collars. When he reached me he did the same, reached down to snap a dangling tag on my collar and checked his watch. I realized with a jolt that all the preparation was probably for the auction, that I was about to be sold. Suddenly my head seemed to be floating well above the rest of me. None of this was real.
Someone fastened my unresisting hands behind my back again, leashed me and led me around the outside of the next building. I seemed to be about ten meters up as I watched myself follow.
I caught a glimpse through a wide side entrance of a large empty barn of a room, with rows of seats in front of a long platform. Then they led me in through a back door and fastened my leash to a ring in the wall. My brain, detached, was mechanically analyzing the setup. I couldn’t see the large room I had glimpsed, though there were stairs with big double doors at the top that must lead out onto the platform.
For a long time I knelt back, tethered in the holding area with the other animals. Gradually I rejoined myself, and fear seeped in
, not swamping me yet, but trickling audibly beneath the floorboards. The vraag was near me, ruffling its scaly feathers and eyeing me in a beady sort of way. I hoped its leash was short; I heard they bit. What would the men see when they looked at me? I was intensely thankful they hadn’t gagged me.
I heard the auction starting, the cadences unmistakable even in the unknown language, and in voices so deep that they seemed to make aching vibrations in my belly. The leashed animals were led or carried up the steps and through the door to the back of the platform, one by one, in the order in which they were lined up at the walls or in cages down the middle. There was an empty feeling somewhere behind my breastbone that made it hard to breathe. Some man must be out there who was going to buy me. Own me. Very soon now, I hoped. This couldn’t be happening; could it? Perhaps I would wake up in my bed at home. I pulled my head away from the wall and felt the collar press very realistically against my throat. I had a small semi-arc in which I could move my head.
I looked around. The room was half empty now. I wondered where the animals went that were auctioned. Where would I go, afterwards? Would a new owner just walk off with me, the way the keeper had walked me away from the ship? And then…? What then? And what if no one bid on me…?
A big, bizarrely patterned cat padded by me, quite close, making me shrink back. That sale seemed to go on for a long time, with the next creature, something long, furry and impatient, winding itself around the keeper’s arms as it waited by the door. Then a pair of birds in a large cage was wheeled past. One of the wheels squeaked. They laid out a ramp and pushed the cage up to the doors and through. Two dogs were growling at each other close by; chains rattled. A man pulled one of them away and up to the platform. Claws scrabbled on the floor. I waited. I breathed a little, gently, behind the balloon that had lodged in my chest. Then the vraag, hissing, allowed itself to be dragged to the platform. It took two handlers, and yes, it tried to bite one of them. Once it was at the door, one of the handlers walked back towards me.
This is it, I thought again, just as I had in the courtroom. Now I felt that this was the moment, the real start of it all. It was one of the events I had envisioned again and again – being sold. This scene, and the moment I saw men for the first time, and the moment in the courtroom – all had been icons of my inner world for years. I could assign this moment to my imagination if I just blurred my eyes a little.
Obviously I had lived in a fantasy world far too long. My room, and my cell, too, had teemed with the figments of my fervid imagination. I could make them so real that when intruders had walked in, painfully ordinary and insensible, I felt uneasy, surprised that they couldn’t sense what shared the room. What they were displacing.
But when I opened my eyes wide again the details jumped out at me, details I couldn’t have imagined: the odd height of the ceiling, the vraag’s elaborate tail feathers as they whisked through the door, the solid pull of the cuffs and the smell of my fear. I could hear the auctioneer’s renewed up and down cadence. The man unfastened me from the wall. Then he was walking me toward the platform. I couldn’t remember having stood up, but I must have. My knees felt weak, and I wondered what would happen if they failed me. My cunt lips slid wetly against each other as I was walked up the steps to the platform. The steps were too high for me; I had to stretch for each one, difficult without hands to balance. A big hand steadied me on the last step. The sounds of selling stopped; the auctioneer was talking to the crowd in normal tones.
The handler steered me through the door, and I was on the platform. The big room opened up before me, men everywhere. There was a rumble in the crowd; once again my naked body was the focus for all the eyes I could see. I could hardly breathe. I closed my eyes for a moment to slow what was accelerating toward me: a hurricane of outrageous joy and humiliation.
When I opened my eyes again I sensed a movement in the crowd. Most of the men were focused on conversations and were no longer looking at me, but a smaller group had moved in around the platform. They were hardly speaking, their rigid tension suggesting competition rather than friendliness, and every single eye was riveted on me.
I figured someone would want me after all.
The men beside me rapidly moved my wrists to the front, linking them with about a foot of chain on heavy leather cuffs. Then they fastened the links to a hook they let down above my head and tightened it until I was up on my toes. The auctioneer began talking, his huge hands on my body, jiggling my breasts to show them off, drawing his fingers down my belly and squeezing my legs, tugging a little on my pubic hair. He turned me around to show me from behind, all the time taking bids, running his hands over the curve of my hips and ass. Then he turned me back again. There was so much to take in: the men’s faces so intent on me; the auctioneer’s booming voice, and his huge hands all over me; my body stretched and helpless. I couldn’t process it all. The bids were coming fast and furious. I clenched my fists above the cuffs, trying to contain the intense fear that occupied me, feeling so stupefied that I didn’t realize just how aroused I was, until I felt my cunt juices seeping down my thighs. I swayed on the chain, nudged this way and that by the man beside me.
Then in response to voices from the crowd, the auctioneer consulted with the handler. They each took one of my ankles and pulled them up toward the crowd and wide apart. My weight was now heavily on my wrists, and I was sure it was impossible to bear so much humiliation. My naked, wet cunt was being exposed so lewdly, so publicly; there was a roaring in my ears, but I thought I heard laughter in the crowd. Suddenly rebellious, I twisted helplessly in the chains and the men’s grasp, like a scrap of silk caught in an iron gate. Hopeless. The men in front of me enjoyed it, however.
When my feet were touching the platform again, I was panting, and scarlet. The slickness of my inner thighs reminded me – and probably told the buyers in front of me – how excited I was as well. There was another series of bids, and then things slowed down. I think the price must have been getting high; several men looked disappointed and stopped bidding.
One man who was still involved was not seated but was standing near the platform to my left, a lean, young-looking man with black hair and a close-cropped beard, tall even in this room full of giants. His intent light green eyes were fastened on me. Those eyes looked electric, in a motionless face, lightning behind basalt cliffs. His face was almost at the same level as mine, despite the height of the platform. Once our eyes touched he seemed to pull me into him. I was caught and snared by the male energy he focused on me. In spite of the bonds stretching me so tightly, I almost felt I would be pulled across the platform to him. His eyes held me as he signaled his bids.
Suddenly I felt the chain slacken and I was pulled away. The bidding had ended. He was gone, I couldn’t see him. Had he bought me? Who had bought me, was it him? I felt frantic, helpless, an animal owned but unsure of its owner.
Home
Garid’s hands moved automatically on the controls of his aircar. He was traveling northwest over the ocean, the two huge islands that were his home region just beyond the horizon. The sun was glittering on the waves below, the afternoon sky its most perfect turquoise. But Garid was oblivious. It was a good thing the autopilot did most of the work of avoiding other vehicles…
His mind moved through the last few hours. He had been early for the auction, and for a while had talked to the other men who were there for the same purpose. There were a few friends among them, met through a network that was pleasant and supportive, except at times like these. He’d known that the competition would be intense, but knew he could handle it. His last few projects had put him beyond the fear of running out of money.
His friend Therin had greeted him with a wry look, which Garid understood very well. They had known they would be in contention, though of course this wouldn’t interfere with their bids.
‘I haven’t seen you on the net,’ Therin had said.
‘Busy realizing my assets.’
‘Bugger.’ Therin, a
wiry young man with a mop of brown curls and a wicked eye, had sat next to Garid and flicked him a glance, both friendly and sardonic.
Garid looked away with a half smile. ‘There’s Donshod.’
‘Do you think he’d share her if he got her? Unlike you?’ In their intense, sometimes obsessive conversations, Garid had expressed some ambivalence about letting anyone else use his hypothetical possession.
‘I think he’d show a new vid of her nightly so he could lecture us on how to use women.’
Therin snickered. ‘Do you ever wonder why he left Algomet 7 if he had so many women there?’ Naturally the group was more off-world aware than most of Henth’s population.
‘Maybe we could find out. Then we could blackmail him into going back.’
‘At least back to Algomet 8.’ This was a mining planet they had heard of for male convicts; both the men snorted at the vision of elegant Donshod in a prison uniform.
‘To be fair, didn’t he find that binder that makes them so small in the waist? He’s not bad at that kind of research.’
‘What, corsets? No, one of the owners has been using them on his woman for years. Donshod just wanted us to think he’d discovered it.’
They had discussed where to have such equipment made, talking as if both of them would be woman owners by the end of the day. But Garid was restless, and had gotten up to see if he could have a look at the real woman, not just the catalogue holo. Although the vendors knew of the special interest in the woman pet, they tended to be casual about displaying their actual merchandise. A few animals had been visible through the doorway into the back area, but she had not been among them. Garid paced. The beauty of the holo had been enough to convince him, had convincing been necessary. He forced himself to stand quietly while the dogs, vraags and agexts were auctioned. He could not make himself sit down.